Sebastopol, CA—"Now, more than ever, developers need to separate themselves from the pack," explains author Tony Northrup. "The 70-519 certification is particularly important because completing the certification validates the developer's higher-level application design skills, and employers know that having a well-designed application can dramatically reduce an application's overall cost-of-ownership."

Northrup continues, "Web application design is crucial. Because it's so easy to get started creating websites with Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4, many developers jump into it head first. Without sufficient planning, however, it's only a matter of time before they begin to run into subtle, but serious, problems. For example, if a developer doesn't plan for scalability, their site will go down the first time it gets popular. If the developer uses server-side logic for something that should run on the client, the application will work fine in testing, but suffer from performance problems in production.

"Proper design is the difference between an application that works," he says, "and an application that lasts for years."

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About the Author

Tony Northrup, MVP, MCSE, MCTS, and CISSP, is a consultant and author. Tony started programming before Windows 1.0 was released, and has also focused on Windows administration and development. He has written about 25 books covering Windows and Web development, networking, and security. Among other titles, Tony is author of MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework—Application Development Foundation, Second Edition.

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